On the road (with a ghost)

Sam Brown is haunted. He's haunted by his inability to move beyond the horror of his mother's murder more than a decade ago. But he's also haunted by his mother,
July Brown
, who comes to him, subtly, in quiet moments, urging him toward something he can't quite figure out. Both comforted and freaked out by these visitations, Sam prescribes himself two tried-and-true cures for anomie: the open road and a few warm, womanly beds.

In her new novel, "Heat Signature," Lisa Teasley skillfully mixes genres from road novel to murder mystery to, yes, sexy read. But her mastery of language and character makes "Heat Signature" rise above the constraints of a genre novel and into the realm of literature.

Teasley has created in Sam Brown a one-of-a-kind character -- intriguing and sometimes a little maddening. A nurse by trade, this young African American man is competent and calm in the clutch, as when his friend Abel, early in the book, is having a breakdown:

"Abel falls over trying to put one leg into the jeans handed to him, so Sam helps him back up, but Abel starts crying.

" 'Hush,' Sam says, not realizing it's exactly the way July did to him."

But Sam himself can be fragile, too. His mother's visitations (accompanied by the smell of her perfume) bring with them terrible headaches and horrifyingly violent visions. He's also emotionally walled off, unable to commit to his girlfriend, Haley (who's a stripper with a snake-patterned tattoo winding up one leg): "Love is a trap he doesn't deserve. If he truly let himself go with Haley, then something might happen to her too," writes Teasley; but given Sam's appetite for unfamiliar women, it seems as if the author is letting her main character get away with some serious tomcatting in the name of psychological damage.

When Sam discovers that the man convicted of his mother's murder is going to be paroled, he lights out for an extended road trip from his home in Joshua Tree up the coast of California. His first stop is in Los Angeles, where he takes the opportunity to knock boots with Sheba Moses, the local weather girl. A little farther up the coast, he goes home with a woman who catches him pleasuring himself in the bathroom of the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Teasley's erotic passages are uncompromising and real, evocatively painted, complete with sights, sounds and smells. These aren't the airbrushed sex scenes of a Harlequin romance.

While Sam pursues women, his mother's paroled killer seemingly pursues him; a mysterious car follows him, a policewoman delivers a warning that the killer has been seen heading north. Finally, on the central Oregon coast, Sam hooks up with Greta, a super-crunchy tree doctor whose glass-and-recycled-wood house in the forest is a refuge from the road, but not emotions.

Side by side with chapters about Sam's road trip, Teasley lays out chapters detailing July Brown's life and death. July has a complex past and even more complex appetites (for men, but also for historical documents from the era when African Americans were slaves). The brutal, nearly pornographic scene of her rape and murder answers one of the book's central mysteries, but Sam's closure comes later, after his mother leads him to the spot where her body was found and he comes face to face with the man who violated his mother.

"Heat Signature" brims with juicy themes -- race, violence, the weight of the past -- and characters who are unusual but not "quirky." With its dark vision, modern-day noir vibe and sexy sensibility, this novel is fine to bring to the beach; just don't forget to bring your brain along, too.